Imagine walking up to a tall, cylindrical pod, and talking to a life-size, 3-D projection of a faraway friend, family member, or colleague.

(via 3-D Video Pod Delivers 360-Degree, Holograph-Like Projections | Gadget Lab | Wired.com)

Cara Santa Maria from the Huffington Post’s Talk Nerdy to Me science segments shows off ICT’s virtual humans - and her shooting skills - in Gunslinger, our Wild West virtual human simulation.

In a study presented last week at the British Psychology Society Annual Conference, a team led by Oxford psychiatry expert Dr. Emily Holmes concluded that when played soon after exposure to trauma, Tetris served as “a cognitive vaccine” that seemed to “inoculate against the build-up of flashbacks.” Why? Because the process of playing Tetris, the team hypothesizes, places demands on one’s brain that interfere with its ability to form and retain the traumatic memories that later emerge as flashbacks.

(via Oxford Docs: We Can Prevent PTSD … With Tetris | Danger Room | Wired.com)

At a training facility on the outskirts of Kabul, the Afghan capital, elite female soldiers practice alongside their male counterparts. Afghan Special Forces want to recruit at least 100 women before the pullout of most NATO combat troops by the end of 2014.

(via Elite female night raiders break down barriers in Afghanistan | Reuters)

Learn about INOTS! The Office of Naval Research-funded Immersive Naval Officer Training System (INOTS) is designed is designed to teach interpersonal communication and leadership skills by practicing complex problem solving and situational awareness in an instructor-facilitated simulation environment with a virtual human.

Check out these pics of ICT’s Emergent Leader Immersive Training Environment. http://on.fb.me/IaOUg4

Our virtual human museum guides, along with several of our real researchers, are teaching kids about science as part of the National Science Foundation booth at the USA Science and Engineering Festival at the DC convention center this weekend. If you are in the area, stop by, say hello and ask them a question about science or how to program a computer.

The ability to automatically determine personality type could change the way social networks target services to users

Check out this “Talk Nerdy to Me” video from the Huffington Post’s Cara Santa Maria.

An article in Defense News covers the FOV2GO, the do-it-yourself 3-D viewer developed at ICT’s Mixed Reality Lab, along with collaborators from the Interactive Media Division at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

The article describes the FOV2GO, which can be created from cardboard or foam core and assembled in minutes, as employing a similar technique to that applied by photo interpreters who analyzed aerial photographs during World War II. FOV2GO simply places left-eye and right-eye views of a smartphone screen side-by-side and then uses two simple magnifying lenses to look at them, states the story.

“The real breakthrough was the understanding that, in fact, this should not cost anything,” said Mark Bolas, ICT’s associate director for mixed reality research and development and director of the MxR Lab. “It is hard to accept that what was once a $100,000 system is now effectively free and can fit in one’s pocket.”